<!--Bamboo Bike Studio employee, Merrily Grashin, helps a customer and demonstrates how to wrap carbon fiber tape around a bamboo bike frame in the parking lot of the Satellite Board Shop in Boulder Colorado Saturday, November 19th, 2011. The "Bamboo Bike Studio provides tools, supplies, instructions and workshops to further the art, science and joy of bike making with kits starting out at $496." Andy Cross, The Denver Post-->

Harry Allen of Colorado Springs, above, files down fiberglass wrap on the frame of a bamboo bike. Allen and a handful of others were participating in a four-day bike building workshop in Boulder run by the Bamboo Bike Studio. With reinforcements such as carbon-fiber tape, left, bamboo bikes can take everyday abuse.

BOULDER — With his gloved hands wrapping epoxy-soaked carbon-fiber ribbon around the chainstays of his bamboo bike frame, Dustin Sysko is relishing each moment of the nearly 20 hours he will spend building a bike from reeds.

“I’ve always liked the idea of making my own stuff,” said the Boulder software developer and avid pedaler whose primary transportation will be the bamboo commuter bike he is building. “There’s an element of pride in what you build, you know. It’s a personal investment. This bike will have personal significance.”

The chilly Boulder parking lot where Sysko and four others were building bikes last weekend is one of several nationwide workshops offered by the Brooklyn, N.Y.; Greensboro, Ala., and San Francisco-based Bamboo Bike Studio. Traveling in a 20-year-old box truck, studio workers host bamboo bike building clinics in Canada, Florida, California and Colorado, where no more than five cyclists pay at least $630 to construct their own, custom-fit bike out of bamboo, balsa, epoxy and carbon fiber.

Since the Bamboo Bike Studio was co-founded in 2008 by former U.S. Ski Team freestyle skier Marty Odlin, builders from several dozen workshops have created more than 450 bamboo bikes.

With a tensile strength greater than steel, bamboo bikes can withstand everyday abuse. And with a capability of growing as much as four feet a day, bamboo is one of the more earth-friendly products out there. (The studio’s newest base, in Greensboro, sits amid forests of bamboo that were planted decades ago as part of an Auburn University experiment.)

“For us this is about being mindful of the products you consume and trying to use everything more wisely,” said the studio’s traveling instructor Dan “Fence” Heanue as he demonstrates the intricate and labor-intensive steps required when building a bike from bamboo stalks. “And of course, building a bike is fun.”

It’s a low-tech process that doesn’t even require electricity. Workshops begin with builders butting personally sized bamboo stalks to balsa wood blocks that are sanded around headtubes, seat tubes, bottom brackets and rear drop outs. Three spools of carbon fiber ribbon is cross hatched across each critical joint with plenty of epoxy. Builders can opt for a single speed, a cruiser or a multigeared road bike.

“It’s super smooth,” Heanue said. “If you are riding even the most rigid bamboo bike, it can feel like a cushy beach cruiser.”

Scott Ledbetter and his wife worked on a single-speed cruiser. The bamboo bike will join the 25 others he has collected over 35 years of cycling.

“I’ve always wanted to make a frame but always thought it would be steel,” the Coal Creek Canyon resident said. “I figure I have 25 bikes, I should know how to make one.”

While fostering America’s fading manufacturing mind-set one workshop at a time is admirable, the Bamboo Bike Studio is looking far beyond domestic pedalers. Last fall, in partnership with Columbia University’s Millennium Cities Initiative, the studio and a Ghana investor opened a bamboo bike factory that can produce 20,000 bikes a year, each priced below $70. Already the factory in Kumasi, Ghana, has made about 800 bikes.

In addition to generating jobs and training Ghana workers in a new industry, the bikes — priced well below the $120 China-made rides popular in developing Africa — deliver transportation opportunities to rural residents who can expand their job prospects and horizons with each pedal stroke.

In the United States, the monthly frame-building workshops and online bike kit sales help support the Bamboo Bike Studio’s three bases. With a cap of only five builders, every workshop — including last week’s clinics in Denver and Boulder — quickly sells out. With a workshop costing $630 for a basic frame and up to $1,350 for a seven-gear road frame, the bamboo rides run about the price of a midrange custom-sized frame.

“Who wants a midrange bike when you can have something unique and interesting?” said Colorado Springs builder Harry Allen as he carefully filed away dried epoxy from his bamboo road bike’s joints. “Especially when you make it yourself.”

Jason Blevins covers tourism, mountain business, skiing and outdoor adventure sports for both the business and sports sections at The Denver Post, which he joined in 1997. He skis, pedals, paddles and occasionally boogies in the hills and is just as inspired by the lively entrepreneurial spirit that permeates Colorado's high country communities as he is by the views.

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